The Associated Press Stylebook becomes like the Bible to many journalists. It’s a guide and takes time to try to understand and put to use. Two students recently penned a column in the Butler Lantern, criticizing AP style, calling it inferior to MLA (Modern Language Association) style, which is used in English classes.
That hit home a bit.
In high school journalism, 44 years ago, the first journalism students of Tom (T.R.) Rolnicki at Ames (Iowa) Senior High School were introduced to the wonderful world of AP style.
Yes, wonderful and electrifying for my classmates and me.
Rolnicki brought a sense of purpose to the journalism lab there and this style of writing was part of it. There were rules for how you wrote everything, from whether you capitalized directions and regions to how you handled addresses. Usually it is done to make things shorter and easier to read. Other times, as noted, it is a bit arbitrary.
Some rules were foreign to English teachers and we felt like we were getting away with something.
But who cares? Why have these ‘special rules’?
Then it sank in and was hammered home.
If the entire publication was done this way, it sure looked like we all gave a darn. It was uniform and correct. We cared about what we wrote and people actually read our stuff.
Sometimes we made people mad and sometimes made mistakes. But it wasn’t for lack of effort.
It’s just like we had this code with AP style.
In college, it got even more stringent. Early on, you’d get your edited copy back and it looked like a chicken had stepped in red ink and walked all over it.
And if you wrote this way in high school, college and the working world, you could do something with it. It would pass through the watchful eyes of editors and actually get published.
We were seniors during T.R.’s first year at our school and after one more year he moved on.
But, good grief, everything changed while he was there. There was an esprit de corps in the journalism lab, the paper had modern graphics (paste-up in those days) and it was also inserted in the town paper (10,000 papers!).
When we moved on to college journalism, the professors would tell us we were ahead due to our experience in that high school.
So that stylebook became a Bible to us. We had a catechism of sorts with an introduction to its rules.
Recently, one of the writers of the opinion piece, headlined AP style seeks to send writing to the ‘Stone Ages,’ said it was satirical. That makes it a little easier to take.
Long live AP style.
Michael Swan
